It’s a rare collection of short stories works as well as Reshma Ruia’s Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness: each of her stories is captivating without any that seem weaker than the others. The characters come from a variety of countries and continents, although most are of Indian descent. The overarching theme in these stories is a sense of missed or lost opportunity, beginning with the story for which the collection is named.
Category Archive: Fiction
Although there is a huge amount of fiction covering the Indian diaspora, it is more usually set in Western countries, including Australia, than in Malaya, as it was, and Singapore. In Kopi, Puffs & Dreams, a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize, Pallavi Gopinath Aney explores the experience of Indian immigrants to Singapore in the early 20th century. Aney’s subject matter will be new to many, her novel interesting as a record of Indian experience to the east of India.
Cat and her friends are in Japan for a long weekend thanks to their high school friend, Phillip. Talia and Faiz, two of the friends, are engaged and want to relive their teenage stunts of visiting haunted houses in Kuala Lumpur. Phillip flies them, along with their friend, Lin, first class tickets from different parts of the world, including the United States. What’s more, Phillip rents out a haunted Heian-era mansion that houses a jilted bride who insisted on being buried alive in the foundation of the house centuries earlier. Since then, young women have been taken on an annual basis by the bride to keep her company.
Belonging—either to another person, a family or a nation—is the key theme of this exquisite coming-of-age novel from British-Asian writer Selma Carvalho. Carvalho has published three non-fiction books which document the Goan migration to colonial East Africa. Her intimate understanding of the diasporic experience shines through every page as she explores her characters’ search for “home”.
“I’m going to tell you the truth,” begins the narrator on the first page of Kim Thúy’s latest, Em, “but only partially, incompletely, more or less.” To put an even finer emphasis on the point, she tells us a couple pages later, that “truth “is fragmented”—as indeed it must be when dealing with a topic as vast as the troubled history of Vietnam. Departing from its brutal colonial entrapment as a rubber producing outlet for the French, cascading through the desolation of the Vietnam War, finally culminating in the strain of exile that became the sole reality available to those who managed to survive, Em accomplishes in some 160 pages what has taken many historians volumes to tell.
Qaraar Ali is a young craftsman in love with the beautiful Abeerah, cherished daughter of a General in the Mughal army. A wanderer, he seeks the company of poets and spends his time visiting the shrines of 18th century Delhi. Trouble is brewing as Persia’s Nadir Shah is gathering a large army and heading towards Delhi. In a few catastrophic moments, Qaraar’s life will be turned upside down. The once idyllic, bustling streets he knew and loved, become tragic scenes of chaos, bloodshed and destruction.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the courageous Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize-winning author of the Gulag Archipelago who died in 2008, considered The Red Wheel his most important work. Its ten volumes cover Russia from pre-World War I days to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the early months of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Red Wheel was the author’s monumental effort to identify the crucial turning point in 20th century Russian history, and Solzhenitsyn’s admirers consider it and Gulag his “two great literary cathedrals”.